I honestly don’t know what to do with myself after having spent the last 12 days enjoying an absorbing new hobby called “checking the Royal Mail package tracking website five times a day trying to figure out when my important package from the UK was going to get unstuck from Customs at the airport in New York City and eventually reach “out for delivery” status so I can arrange to be home to sign for it”. The package never did leave Kennedy, as far as the website was concerned, and it was purely by chance that I was at home the other afternoon.

Then, of course, I was even more absorbed for a while, because in that important package from the UK was that most important of purchases: a new camera. Or, rather, a new to me camera, a very secondhand camera indeed. (Technically, it’s at least a third hand camera, since the person I bought it from bought it on ebay and who knows where it was before that). It’s rather battered, but works perfectly, and it’s that Fuji X-Pro1 I’ve wanted since I first went digital. I couldn’t afford it at the time, but things move fast in digital camera tech and an almost six year old model can be found for pennies on the original dollar, or the original GBP. (Don’t worry, kind seller, it has gone to a good home.) Here it is:

Desktop Cap: Holy Moly! Is that a camera, or the Monolith from those trippy “Space Odyssey” movies the other Avengers have been making watch?

Me: It’s both, Cap: meet the Monolith, my new old Fuji X-Pro1. It’s going to have its own hashtags and everything.

Cap doesn’t want to get into a long discussion where I try to explain hashtags and he tells me about all the canned hash he ate during The War, but the Monolith’s hashtags are the two parts of its famous line from the end of the movie 2010/ the novel 2061: Odyssey Three: “All these worlds are yours except Europa” and “Attempt no landings there”. All one word. Each With a hash mark. These will work on my Instagram account (@kekiongacomics) to find all the cool pictures I hope to take with this camera once I figure out how it works. Until then, here’s a sample.

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